Taliban storm Kabul apartment, arrest activist, her sisters

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — The Taliban stormed an house in Kabul, smashing the door in and arresting a girl rights activist and her three sisters, an eyewitness mentioned Thursday. A Taliban assertion appeared accountable the incident on a latest ladies’s protest, saying insulting Afghan values will not be tolerated.

The activist, Tamana Zaryabi Paryani, was amongst about 25 ladies who took half in an anti-Taliban protest on Sunday towards the obligatory Islamic headband, or hijab, for ladies. An individual from the neighborhood who witnessed the arrest mentioned about 10 armed males, claiming to be from the Taliban intelligence division, carried out the raid on Wednesday evening.

Shortly earlier than she and her sisters had been taken away, footage of Paryani was posted on social media, displaying her frightened and breathless and screaming for assist, saying the Taliban had been banging on her door.

“Assist please, the Taliban have come to our residence . . . solely my sisters are residence,” she is heard saying within the footage. There are different feminine voices within the background, crying. “I can’t open the door. Please . . . assist!”

Related Press footage from the scene on Thursday confirmed the house’s entrance door, product of steel and painted reddish brown, dented and left barely ajar. The occupants of a neighboring house ran inside their residence, not wanting to speak to reporters. An outer safety door of metal slats was shut and padlocked, making it not possible to enter Paryani’s house.

The witness mentioned the raid occurred round 8 p.m. The armed males went as much as the third flooring of the Kabul house advanced the place Paryani lives and started pounding on the entrance door ordering her to open the door.

When she refused, they kicked the door repeatedly till it opened, the witness mentioned. “They took 4 females away, all of them had been sisters,” the witness mentioned, including that one of many 4 was Paryani, the activist.

The witness spoke on situation of anonymity, fearing Taliban reprisal.

The spokesman for the Taliban-appointed police in Kabul, Gen. Mobin Khan, tweeted that Paryani’s social video put up was a manufactured drama. A spokesman for the Taliban intelligence, Khalid Hamraz, would neither verify nor deny the arrest.

Nevertheless, he tweeted that “insulting the non secular and nationwide values of the Afghan individuals is just not tolerated anymore” — a reference to Sunday’s protest throughout which the protesters appeared to burn a white burqa, the all-encompassing conventional head-to-toe feminine garment that solely leaves a mesh opening for the eyes.

Hamraz accused rights activists of maligning Afghanistan’s new Taliban rulers and their safety forces to realize asylum within the West.

Since sweeping to energy in mid-August, the Taliban have imposed widespread restrictions, lots of them directed at ladies. Ladies have been banned from many roles, outdoors the well being and training subject, their entry to training has been restricted past sixth grade and so they have been ordered to put on the hijab. The Taliban have, nevertheless, stopped wanting imposing the burqa, which was obligatory after they beforehand dominated Afghanistan within the Nineteen Nineties.

At Sunday’s demonstration in Kabul, ladies carried placards demanding equal rights and shouted: “Justice!” They burned a white burqa and mentioned they can't be pressured to put on the hijab. Organizers of the demonstration mentioned Paryani attended the protest, which was dispersed after the Taliban fired tear gasoline into the group of girls.

Paryani belongs to a rights group referred to as “Seekers of Justice,“ which organized a number of demonstrations in Kabul, together with Sunday’s. The group’s members haven't spoken publicly of her arrest however have been sharing the video of Paryani.

The New York-based Human Rights Watch criticized the crackdown, saying that since taking on Afghanistan 5 months in the past, the Taliban “have rolled again the rights of girls and women, together with blocking entry to training and employment for a lot of.“

“Ladies’s rights activists have staged a sequence of protests; the Taliban has responded by banning unauthorized protests,” the watchdog mentioned in a press release after Sunday’s protest.

The Taliban have more and more focused Afghanistan’s beleaguered rights teams, in addition to journalists, with native and worldwide tv crews masking demonstration typically detained and generally crushed.

Additionally Thursday, the Committee to Shield Journalists issued a press release asking the Taliban to analyze a latest assault on a documentary movie maker Zaki Qais who mentioned two armed males, who recognized themselves as Kabul police officers, entered his residence and beat him. One tried to stab him, in response to Steven Butler, the CPJ’s Asia program coordinator.

“Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers should instantly launch an investigation to determine and produce to justice those that attacked journalist Zaki Qais,” mentioned Butler. “The Taliban’s continued silence on these repeated assaults on journalists undermines any remaining credibility of pledges to permit unbiased media to proceed working.”

Final week the CPJ sought info on an assault on one other Kabul-based journalist, Noor Mohammad Hashemi, deputy director for the non revenue Salam Afghanistan Media Group, who was crushed up by three unidentified males.